Text
by 9r7g5h
Summary: Danny had promised to text. Carmilla: The Series.


**AN:** It's been a while since I've written some Lawdorf, and I had to get this little fic out of my mind before I could start working on my pieces for Creampuff Week. I apologize right now for this. I literally wrote this at 3 am, and I'm honestly exhausted. But it demanded to be finished, so here you go. If I feel like fixing it up some later I will. And if not, oh well. I hope it still entertains you.

 **Disclaimer:** I don't own Carmilla. U by Kotex does.

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 _"Just text me every now and then so I know you're alive, okay?"_

It had been weeks since Betty had left, almost a full two months since her transfer over to Princeton had gone through, and still Danny was keeping that promise.

It wasn't often she was able to- with the three way war keeping her busy and the faulty power supply making it hard for her to justify using the precious power on her phone to send a long distance text when she might need to warn her sisters about their enemies, the texts were sent once, maybe twice a week, if at that. Always the same two words, partly so she could just hit 'resend' and continue on, and partly because she had nothing else to say.

She didn't want Betty knowing just how bad things were here, not when she was finally out and able to have something that resembled a normal life, so every week she just sent those same two words and left it at that.

 _I'm alive._ And that was it.

Betty would respond with questions and demands for details that she ignored- the less Betty knew the better. She didn't need to know about the raids the Summer Society was conducting on the Alchemy Club, where flaming arrows eventually met beakers of homemade gun powder and blew up their home base. A raid where luckily no one died, but where death had been close for many. A raid that even she walked away from with a shiny new scar on her side after a few weeks of first aid, shaped almost like a pumpkin if she glanced down and squinted at it.

Betty didn't need to know about the food shortages or the lack of clean water, how every rainfall was collected and stored and rationed until the next and hunting parties went every day into the woods, hoping to find food, most coming back with just injuries from whatever was lurking in those forests.

Betty didn't need to know about the murders, or about how the campus was being sold off bit by bit, or anything really. Betty needed to know her class schedule at Princeton and which assignments were due when and all the best places to meet girls so one day, when Danny texted I'm alive, Betty would just say Good in response and leave it at that.

So Danny said nothing, and just hoped that her weekly text was enough.

Weekly texts that became every other week, and then once a month, simply forgetting to send them as things went right back to the hell they were used to. Because between trying to solve the murders and save the campus, between trying to keep the war from progressing and figure out a way to just get out that didn't involve trying to hike almost seven thousand students through the mountains, between just everything that was going on, with Laura and Carmilla and her and the others right in the middle of it all, where was there time? Where was there time to think about the blonde who had left them to deal with a furious demigod and blood cults for the safety of another dorm on another campus, with perhaps another TA? Where was there time, between stabbing vampires and tying up brainwashed anglerfish worshipers, to think about Betty and what might have been, had any of their choices been different _(had Betty stayed, had she left with her, had they met on a different campus in a different country under different circumstances, just anywhere different)_?

There wasn't time, so she didn't. She didn't think about Betty, forgot about her, and focused entirely on the mess that was their lives.

She forgot about Betty until half way through July, when someone started banging on the doors of the Summer Society house at four in the morning, just an hour after Danny herself had been able to get to sleep. It'd been a rough day, between fighting off another round of giant mushrooms the Club had set loose to combat the harpies, forgetting that they couldn't control them, and trying to help Carmilla, LaF, and Perry calm Laura down after the realization that it'd been over a year since she'd seen her dad, and the likelihood of any of them being able to leave anytime soon was almost none. It hadn't taken long, a half hour at the most to talk her down and get her back on the focused path with a promise that the moment the world was safe they could leave, but that half hour had drained her like no battle could.

Over a year since they'd been home, since their fight had begun, and absolutely no end in sight. It took her half the night to get to sleep, her mind wrapped up in those thoughts, so when the pounding began and her roommate sleepily yelled for her to get it, it was with protest that she went, barely able to keep her eyes open as she stumbled through the halls.

Only to find herself wide awake when the person at the door wrapped their arms around her waist and buried their face into her neck, whispering thanks to some unknown deity between hiccupping sobs that blurred together into unintelligible mumbling.

Unintelligible mumbling that turned into rage as Betty pulled herself together, her phone out and held in front of her, showing hundreds of text messages that Danny had been ignoring and dozens phone calls she had missed and hadn't thought to return, because if she had she would have had to actually tell Betty what was going on. She would have had to talk to her, to focus on something other than her current reality, and she hadn't been able to do it. Hadn't been able to stand the thought of talking to her, so she hadn't.

Which had somehow lead to a pissed off Betty screaming in the living room of the Summer Society house, Sisters crowding the staircase to watch the fallout, somehow thousands of miles away from the safety of Princeton where she was supposed to be. Somehow in the middle of their own little war and personal hell, where at any moment they might be attacked, where all of them slept with knives under their pillows and their bows and arrows by their night stands. Where the creatures that wandered the dark should have already eaten her as a snack, yet here she was in the middle of the night, cursing Danny out in a rage befit the goddess of war they prayed to before each battle.

A fit of rage that was only quelled when the current President of the Summer Society shoved half the girls blocking her way down the stairs and glared, the piercing gaze that had frozen dragons in their tracks quieting Betty after a few moments, her voice trailing off quickly under her stare. Leaving them all in silence, broken only when the President ordered a few girls to make up the couch for Betty to sleep on, since it was clear this was an issue that needed to be continued in the morning. An order that sent those handful of girls to do her bidding and the rest back to bed before she could turn her glare on them.

It was only after the three of them were alone that her face softened, almost into a smile, and she wished the two of them good night before leaving herself, throwing over her shoulder the reminder that lover's quarrels should be held at a descent hour so the rest of them could sleep.

Leaving the two of them alone in the living room, both beyond exhausted but refusing to sleep, words hovering between them that they wanted to say but couldn't, not without restarting the rage just simmering below Betty's calm and igniting the one that had been building in Danny at her words, only dampened by her confusion and lack of sleep. Finally, when the couch was made and everyone upstairs was settling back into bed, they spoke.

"I'm sorry I didn't text."

"I'm just glad you're not dead."

And both together said "I've missed you," without a second thought, for they had. In the weeks before Betty had left they had been a constant within each other's lives, Danny walking her through the things she had missed, the two of them working together to find clever reasons for why Princeton should let her in despite her rejection of them and her miserable failure of a first semester. When things had begun to turn dangerous, Danny had taught her the basics of how to defend herself, training sessions that went for hours as Betty perfected her self-defense, guided by the ginger.

It had been the quiet moments, when neither said a thing, where they just sat there and watched each other, that Danny had missed the most. And apparently Betty had too, because apparently almost two months without a text counted as enough for her to drop her summer classes and return to the campus she hated, just to check and make sure she was alright and alive, so one day they could have those quiet moments again. Because she didn't care that now she couldn't leave, probably wouldn't be able to leave until after the fight was over, and they would all be miserable and in danger until it was.

Because those quiet moments, and every single other moment the two had when they were together, were enough to make up for it.

Almost eight months ago, Danny had promised she would send a text every now and then to let Betty know she was alive, that she was okay in the crap shoot that was her world. But now, with Betty sleeping on the couch the floor below and the first hopeful promise of something she refused to name right now because of their little war sitting heavy and warm in her chest, Danny couldn't say she was upset she had broken her promise to do so.


End file.
